Like Tabasco

“I don’t get what you see in him,” I said.

Parker smiled into his tea. “He’s … different.”

“Different,” I said. I looked at the sun-white windshield of the car parked outside. “What does that mean, ‘different’?”

“I don’t know,” Parker said. “There’s something about him. He has a quality. He’s different.”

“Okay,” I said patiently. “Different how, exactly? What makes him different?”

Parker leaned away, frowning. “Don’t interrogate me.”

“I’m trying to understand.”

“You’re trying to box. You want to pigeonhole everything. I hate that about you.”

“Oh, stop it,” I said, waving off his outrage. “I just want to know what you see in this guy.”

“Why is it so important to you?”

“Because he’s important to you,” I said. I took another sip of my chai. “And you’re important to me.”

“And you want to know if I like him better than I liked you,” Parker said.

“God, I’m having flashbacks to every fight we had for the last three weeks,” I said.

“Me too. So can you stop with the third degree?”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “I -”

“Jason, let it GO,” Parker said. He glanced out, shielded his eyes with his hand, and looked back into the café. “Let’s talk about something else.”

“Fine,” I said. “How’s work?”

“Same as always,” he said. “Food comes in, food goes out. In between we get money.”

“So business is good?”

Parker shrugged, sipping his tea. “Good enough. How’s the wild world of architecture?”

“Nothing new,” I said. “Still working on the same commissions. Thanks so much for asking,  Parker.”

Parker stuck out his tongue. He started fidgeting with the condiments. “Why are these here? Salt and pepper for coffee?”

“I think they serve breakfast, too,” I said.

“Two Tabasco sauces? Just what we need, more ways to drown all the flavor.”

“Or enhance it,” I said. I wanted to needle him a little.

Parker frowned, shaking his head. “They’re the same thing.”

The wind shifted, and a tree leaned just enough to block the sun from the windshield.

“The same but different,” I said.

Broken

“I wasn’t expecting you.” She didn’t look up from the bedspread, smoothing it out where she was just sitting.

“Nothing was getting done,” he said. “I figured I’d call it a day.”

“Hmm,” she said, stopping to give him a quick peck. “Well, I wasn’t expecting you.”

“If you have plans -” The words dropped, stones in a bottomless well.

“No,” she said. “Not really. I was just surprised, that’s all.”

“I should’ve called,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I just wasn’t ready.”

“Ready?” he said.

“I don’t think this is working,” she said, holding his eyes. Space recoiled from him like flesh from a cut.

His mouth was dry. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I think we should stop seeing each other,” she said. “I just … I don’t feel what you feel. I’m sorry. I know you want me to, but I don’t.”

“So I like you too much?”

She shook her head. His hurt echoed back at him in her eyes and the set of her mouth. She scooped spiders in newspaper and set them in the yard. He didn’t care.

“You like me how you like me,” she said. “It’s just not how I like you. I’m sorry.”

He took a deep breath. His mouth was so dry. His laptop bag cut into his shoulder. He shifted it a little.

“I don’t get it. I don’t get you. We’re having a great time. I’m nuts about you. What did I do wrong?”

She reached for his arm, then caught herself. “You want so much. And I want you to have it, because I like you and I care about you. But I can’t give it to you. I can’t make you whole.”

“I don’t know what that means,” he said. He could hear the edge in his voice and it embarrassed him.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m really sorry.”

“I think I should go,” he said, already walking away. “This doesn’t make sense.”

The car started. He turned on the a/c. He heard the traffic report but none of the streets were close. He stared at the seat belt light. There was air all around him, but none of it touched him. He felt as if he were shrinking in on himself and sinking into the chair. The sun was too bright.

He backed out suddenly without looking. He felt a jolt and heard a crash, but it was all far away. He got out to look. The other car was dented, too. His taillight was in shards. His car looked like a child’s toy now, not a serious piece of machinery. His face felt hot and he wanted to scream.

Winter Song

The storm fell on the mountains like a dog on a bone. Wind howled over stump and tree to tear at him with knife-sharp teeth and cruel groping claws. Snow sprayed his face as he stumbled through waist-deep drifts, wood stacked chin-high in his arms.

The cabin was close. He couldn’t see it, couldn’t see anything near it. Just out of reach the world turned to a swirl of white.  But he had six long years’ knowledge of the mountain in snowstorm and sunlight. Her bones shaped the drifts, and he knew them through the crunch of crystals under his feet.

Every step was a struggle. The storm fed on earth, branch, and snow, an endless avalanche scraping the slope raw as a wound.  His breath brittled under his nose. Precious wood rattled and slid as he stumbled, then righted himself.

The door coalesced from the blizzard. He drove himself to one last effort – five more steps and he was home to walls and hearth. Four. Two. Now the fire crackled in the hearth of river rocks, and he stacked the wood beside. Now he slumped in his chair, just for a minute.

The fire was lower and the wind no louder when he woke up. A log for the fire before he took off his coat and gloves to sit at the keyboard. He made it himself: a pine bough planed flat and smooth, keys painted on in shark-eye black and bleached bone. It looked wrong – odd keys in each octave, the minor keys in particular often misplaced and too many.

He knew it. He knew the sounds of his instrument as well as any made by man. He knew the touch and action of these flat lifeless keys. He could close his eyes and let his fingers summon triumph, heartache, love, loss, and every tint and texture of the heart. Felted hammers on taut wire could not match the beauty his mind heard.

He looked down into the valley, down into the lighted orderly streets of the city. The lake lay still under a sheet of ice, just as it had six years before.